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Latest Articles: Science/Tech
Lightning Strike in Africa Helps Take Pulse of Sun
Post Date: 2009-11-19 15:49:43 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Lightning Strike in Africa Helps Take Pulse of Sun ScienceDaily (Nov. 14, 2009) — Sunspots, which rotate around the Sun's surface, tell us a great deal about our own planet. Scientists rely on them, for instance, to measure the Sun's rotation or to prepare long-range forecasts of Earth's health. But there are some years, like this one, where it's not possible to see Sunspots clearly. When we're at this "solar minimum," very few, if any, Sunspots are visible from Earth. That poses a problem for scientists in a new scientific field called "Space Weather," which studies the interaction between the Sun and Earth's environment. Thanks to a ...
GREAT WESTERN FIREBALL
Post Date: 2009-11-19 15:26:06 by Prefrontal Vortex
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GREAT WESTERN FIREBALL: Yesterday, Nov. 18th, something exploded in the atmosphere above the western United States. Witnesses in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho say the fireball "turned night into day" and issued shock waves that "shook the ground" when it exploded just after midnight Mountain Standard Time. The fireball was so bright it actually turned the night sky noontime blue, as shown in this image from KSL TV in Utah: Although the fireball appeared during the Leonid meteor shower, it was not a Leonid. Infrasound recordings of the blast suggest a small asteroid hitting Earth's atmosphere and exploding with an energy of 0.5 to 1 kiloton of TNT. Experts ...
Suppressed energy breakthroughs: see for yourself and evaluate
Post Date: 2009-11-18 13:54:55 by Horse
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From time-to-time, mainstream news reports on energy-creation breakthroughs. The video links below will remind you and evoke the follow-up thought, “Why haven’t we heard more about these?” For example, last year leading electromagnet expert and MIT professor Markus Zahn verified that the magnetic motor of Thane Hines did indeed create acceleration without any input of energy (and here). That is, once started, the magnetic motor speeds up on its own. In fact, the motor needs to be slowed or its acceleration will continue until the speed is so great that it breaks the motor. Why haven’t we all heard of this? Let's consider possible answers. We know it isn’t ...
How Italy Beat the World to a Smarter Grid
Post Date: 2009-11-17 22:19:13 by DeaconBenjamin
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An aggressive rollout of intelligent electrical meters is saving Italy's Enel 750 million dollars per year -- and cutting customers' bills After several false starts, 2010 finally could be the year when smart meters go global. The technology, which lets energy companies and consumers more closely monitor their electricity consumption, has many champions. The US government has earmarked $4.5 billion from the stimulus package to subsidize the rollout of smart meters nationwide. European Union politicians are pushing hard to connect 80 percent of the region's homes and businesses to smart meters by 2020. Even emerging giants like India and China aim to install the technology in ...
A 25-Year Battery
Post Date: 2009-11-17 18:50:23 by Horse
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Long-lived nuclear batteries powered by hydrogen isotopes are in testing for military applications Batteries that harvest energy from the nuclear decay of isotopes can produce very low levels of current and last for decades without needing to be replaced. A new version of the batteries, called betavoltaics, is being developed by an Ithaca, NY-based company and tested by Lockheed Martin. The batteries could potentially power electrical circuits that protect military planes and missiles from tampering by destroying information stored in the systems, or by sending out a warning signal to a military center. The batteries are expected to last for 25 years. The company, called Widetronix, is ...
The X PRIZE Foundation Announces First Asia-Based Contender for Genome Sequencing Prize
Post Date: 2009-11-17 14:13:09 by Prefrontal Vortex
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The X PRIZE Foundation Announces First Asia-Based Contender for Genome Sequencing Prize Taiwanese Team, cracker, to Compete for the $10 Million Archon X PRIZE for Genomics PLAYA VISTA, CA--(Marketwire - November 17, 2009) - The X PRIZE Foundation announced today that cracker, a group based in Taiwan, is the newest team accepted to compete for the $10 million Archon X PRIZE for Genomics. This new competitor makes the quest for rapid and cost-effective whole human genome sequencing a truly global competition with teams representing three continents. To win the largest medical prize in history, teams must successfully sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days for less than $10,000 per ...
Defense Intelligence Agency Has a Positive Report on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions aka Cold Fusion
Post Date: 2009-11-17 12:50:41 by Horse
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US Defense Intelligence Agency Report - Technology Forecast: Worldwide Research on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Increasing and Gaining Acceptance (8 page pdf) here: newenergytimes.com/v2/new...9/2009DIA-08-0911-003.pdf Japan, Italy and Israel have the most advanced programs. Russia, France, China, South Korea and India are spending considerable resources.
Leonoid Meteor Shower
Post Date: 2009-11-16 12:42:40 by war
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During the 2009 Leonid meteor shower, you may see anywhere from 30 to 300 shooting stars an hour, depending on whether you're in the right place to see tonight's showy peak, experts predict. With the highest number of meteors streaking across the skies around 4:45 p.m. ET on November 17, the full Leonids peak will be effectively invisible for viewers in North America and Europe. In those regions, sky-watchers are advised to venture out away from bright city lights between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. on the 17th, when they should see 30 to 50 meteors an hour. (Find out how light pollution has changed our views of the night sky.) But in Asia, the peak happens during predawn hours, so ...
Millions of Useless Purchases Explained at Last!
Post Date: 2009-11-13 13:22:49 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Millions of Useless Purchases Explained at Last! Researchers say people with a certain gene variant are more likely to have credit-card debt. There are some genetics discoveries that make me sit up straight, reread to make sure I understand what the scientists have found, and then think to myself, this cannot end well. I'll cut to the chase: genetic testing as part of your credit-card or mortgage application? (Click here to follow Sharon Begley) The discovery in question is that people who carry a particular variant of a well-studied gene are more likely—significantly more likely—to rack up credit-card debt. In a world where decisions about loans take into account whether ...
Google Poised to Become Your Phone Company
Post Date: 2009-11-12 16:47:31 by tom007
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Google Poised to Become Your Phone Company * By Ryan Singel Email Author * November 11, 2009 | * 6:55 pm | * Categories: Telecommunications * Google is set to become your new phone company, perhaps reducing your phone bill to zilch in the process. Seriously. Michael Robertson, the founder of Gizmo5 Michael Robertson, the founder of Gizmo5 Google has reportedly spent $30 million to buy Gizmo5, an online phone company. The service is akin to Skype — but based on open protocols and with a lot fewer users. Gizmo5’s founder Michael Robertson, a brash serial entrepreneur, would only say that he could not comment on rumors when asked by Wired.com about a story TechCrunch ran Monday ...
State of the Climate National Overview October 2009
Post Date: 2009-11-12 13:26:28 by farmfriend
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State of the Climate National Overview October 2009 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center Temperature Highlights - OctoberThe average October temperature of 50.8°F was 4.0°F below the 20th Century average and ranked as the 3rd coolest based on preliminary data. For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record. The month was marked by an active weather pattern that reinforced unseasonably cold air behind a series of cold fronts. Temperatures were below normal in eight of the nation's nine climate regions, and of the nine, five were much below normal. Only the Southeast climate region had near normal temperatures for ...
Strange Days Are Here - Psychic Computers Now Record Your Memories
Post Date: 2009-11-11 11:28:40 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Strange Days Are Here - Psychic Computers Now Record Your Memories What would happen if we really could record what a person sees? Would dealers sell mind's eye memories like Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) does in Strange Days, or would editors make them into movie memorials like in The Final Cut? Thanks to a breakthrough by neurologists at the University of California, Berkeley, we're about to find out. At last month's Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, researcher Jack Gallant presented the results of an experiment in which a person's brain activity was used to recreate what the person was watching when the activity occurred. Researchers already use brain scans to ...
Antimatter lightning
Post Date: 2009-11-08 23:12:59 by Armadillo
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During two recent lightning storms, Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy that could have been produced only by the decay of energetic positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. The observations are the first of their kind for lightning storms. Michael Briggs of the University of Alabama in Huntsville announced the puzzling findings November 5 at the 2009 Fermi Symposium. ... During lightning storms previously observed by other spacecraft, energetic electrons moving toward the craft slowed down and produced gamma rays. The unusual positron signature seen by Fermi suggests that the normal orientation for an electric field associated with a lightning storm somehow ...
Deep in the Forest, Bambi Remains The Cold War's Last Prisoner
Post Date: 2009-11-06 16:36:45 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Deep in the Forest, Bambi Remains The Cold War's Last PrisonerDeer Still Shun Iron Curtain Border, 20 Years After the Guards and Barbed Wire Vanished By CECILIE ROHWEDDER GRAFENAU, Germany -- It has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell. But deep in the forest here, a red deer called Ahornia still refuses to cross the old Iron Curtain. Ahornia inhabits the thickly wooded mountains along what once was the fortified border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. At the height of the Cold War, a high electric fence, barbed wire and machine-gun-carrying guards cut off Eastern Europe from the Western world. The barriers severed the herds of deer on the two sides as well. The fence is ...
Ee wah gum! Babies cry with regional accents
Post Date: 2009-11-06 15:56:59 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Ee wah gum! Babies cry with regional accents By David Derbyshire Last updated at 4:49 PM on 06th November 2009 Newborn babies cry with regional 'accents' copied from their mothers, researchers have shown. An astonishing new study found that the screams of a five-day-old French baby have a distinct Gallic twang, while German babies have a Teutonic quality to their yells. The discovery suggests that babies are eavesdropping on their parent's conversations while still in the womb and are picking up their accents. The researchers believe newborns could also be crying in regional accents - and that Geordie infants sound different from Brummies. Past studies have shown that ...
Chinese challenge to 'out of Africa' theory
Post Date: 2009-11-06 11:06:50 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Chinese challenge to 'out of Africa' theory The discovery of an early human fossil in southern China may challenge the commonly held idea that modern humans originated out of Africa. Jin Changzhu and colleagues of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, announced to Chinese media last week that they have uncovered a 110,000-year-old putative Homo sapiens jawbone from a cave in southern China's Guangxi province. The mandible has a protruding chin like that of Homo sapiens, but the thickness of the jaw is indicative of more primitive hominins, suggesting that the fossil could derive from interbreeding. If confirmed, the finding would lend ...
Success in 'space elevator' competition
Post Date: 2009-11-05 17:52:12 by farmfriend
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Success in 'space elevator' competition By JOHN ANTCZAK, AP 21 hours ago EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — A robot powered by a ground-based laser beam climbed a long cable dangling from a helicopter on Wednesday to qualify for prize money in a $2 million competition to test the potential reality of the science fiction concept of space elevators. The highly technical contest brought teams from Missouri, Alaska and Seattle to Rogers Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, most familiar to the public as a space shuttle landing site. The contest requires their machines to climb 2,953 feet (nearly 1 kilometer) up a cable slung beneath a helicopter hovering nearly a mile high. ...
Al Gore Set To Become First “Carbon Billionaire” : CO2 tax agenda front man lining his pockets on the back of global warming fearmongering
Post Date: 2009-11-03 16:03:39 by scrapper2
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The New York Times has lifted the lid on how Al Gore stands to benefit to the tune of billions of dollars if the carbon tax proposals he is pushing come to fruition in the United States, while documenting how he has already lined his pockets on the back of exaggerated fearmongering about global warming. As is to be expected, the article is largely a whitewash and takes an apologist stance in defense of Gore. However, the NY Times‘ John M. Broder does reveal how one of the companies Gore invested in, Silver Spring Networks, recently received a contract worth $560 million dollars from the Energy Department to install “smart meters” in people’s homes that record (and ...
Attack of the galactic subatomic particles
Post Date: 2009-11-03 11:45:46 by farmfriend
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Attack of the galactic subatomic particles November 2nd, 2009 10:27 AM by Phil Plait in Astronomy, Science What is the source of cosmic rays? Seems like an easy enough question. Cosmic rays are little subatomic particles zipping across the Universe. We’ve known about them for decades, and just about any astronomer who has used a space telescope knows and loathes them; cosmic rays zap our detectors, leaving bright streaks in the images which need to be tediously cleaned out before we can do any real science. I spent a large fraction of my time with Hubble doing just that. But what’s generating them? They seem to come from all directions in the sky, making it difficult to pin ...
Five Myths About Our Land of Opportunity
Post Date: 2009-11-02 18:06:02 by Kamala
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Five Myths About Our Land of Opportunity Economic Mobility, Children & Families, U.S. Poverty, U.S. Economy Isabel V. Sawhill, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies Ron Haskins, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies The Washington Post Save Print E-mail Share DeliciousDiggDiigoFacebookGoogle LinkedInLiveNewsvineStumbleUponYahoo November 01, 2009 — Americans have always believed that their country is unique in providing the opportunity to get ahead. Just combine hard work with a bit of talent and you'll climb the ladder—or so we've told ourselves for generations. But rising unemployment and financial turmoil are puncturing that self-image. The reality of this "land of ...
KODAK Film Works Great upon Earth; rather hyper bluish on the moon
Post Date: 2009-10-31 02:25:37 by RickyJ
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KODAK Film Works Great upon Earth; rather hyper bluish on the moon This report is also suggesting there's been Life on Venus; as in Truth or Consequences there's been other life. (though most folks would much prefer the consequences, rather than admit to their being snookered) By; Brad Guth / GASA~IEIS updated: November 21, 2004 I believe that I'm within fullest agreement with the statement offered by "coberst" as pertaining to that of "Science and Truth", whereas my interpretations of what I have perceived as situated upon Venus is just that, my honest to-God though humanly subjective interpretation (mistakes and all), based upon what is entirely possible ...
Don’t Tell Geico: You May Be a Natural Born Bad Driver
Post Date: 2009-10-30 15:10:57 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Don’t Tell Geico: You May Be a Natural Born Bad Driver By Alexis Madrigal Next time you get cut off by a another driver, consider giving the offender a break: One-third of Americans might be genetically predisposed to crappy driving. No, really, it’s not just your imagination. In a new study of college undergraduates, those with a common genetic variation scored 20 percent worse in a driving simulator than their counterparts. “The people who had this genetic variation performed more poorly from the get-go and learned more slowly as they went along,” said Steven Cramer, a University of California, Irvine neurologist, who works on helping stroke victims recover. ...
INTERNAL MODELING MISTAKES BY IPCC ARE SUFFICIENT TO REJECT ITS ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING CONJECTURE
Post Date: 2009-10-29 20:56:06 by sourcery
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Some critics of the science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) urge that its reliance on a consensus of scientists is false, while others simply point out that regardless, science is never decided by consensus. Some critics rely on fresh analyses of radiosonde and satellite data to conclude that water vapor feedback is negative, contrary to its representation in Global Climate Models (GCMs). Some argue that the AGW model must be false because the climate has cooled over the last decade while atmospheric CO2 continued its rise. Researchers discovered an error in the reduction of data, the widely publicized Hockey Stick Effect, that led to a false conclusion that the Little Ice Age was not ...
Genes drive behaviour, but culture can select genes: study
Post Date: 2009-10-29 18:29:07 by Prefrontal Vortex
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Genes drive behaviour, but culture can select genes: study By Marlowe Hood (AFP) – 1 day ago PARIS — Culture, not just genes, can drive evolutionary outcomes, according to a study released Wednesday that compares individualist and group-oriented societies across the globe. Bridging a rarely-crossed border between natural and social sciences, the study looks at the interplay across 29 countries of two sets of data, one genetic and the other cultural. The researchers found that most people in countries widely described as collectivist have a specific mutation within a gene regulating the transport of serotonin, a neurochemical known to profoundly affect mood. In China and other ...
US Airways to slash 1,000 jobs
Post Date: 2009-10-29 08:07:23 by DeaconBenjamin
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NEW YORK: US Airways will trim its workforce by 1,000 employees, including 200 pilots, as part of its restructuring efforts. The loss making airline would be reducing the number of employees in the first half of 2010. The reductions would include about 600 airport passenger and ramp service positions, approximately 200 pilot jobs and nearly 150 flight attendant positions, US Airways said in a statement on yesterday. In a letter to the employees, the carrier's chairman and CEO Doug Parker said it was a difficult decision to make. "By focusing on our strengths and eliminating unprofitable flying, we will increase the likelihood of returning US Airways to long-term profitability, ...
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